After a mostly sunny and hot summer, it's like payback time now in Toronto. I can count the number of beautiful crisp Fall days maybe with 2 hands. Fall also marks the beginning of a busy season for our family, with weekends now being taken up by hockey practices! The Mr. barely has time to continue or start any new projects around the house now.

As we planned out project after project, sometimes it's easy to lose sight of our accomplishments. Having just celebrated our one year anniversary at the house, it's probably a good time to do an annual review of our progress thus far.

With downsizing to a smaller house, our top priority has been tackling storage needs around the house. From addressing what drives us (me) absolutely insane to storage that incorporates beauty, here's a list of the Mr.'s most accomplished DIY projects around our house this past year:

KITCHEN

The kitchen is the heart of the home, and it was naturally the space in the house that got the most attention from the get-go. With it being used practically on a daily basis, it has the highest potential to drive us insane if it doesn't function well. This was what our kitchen looked like when we closed the house last year:

When I was making too many one-pot pasta to avoid crawling into the pots and pans cabinet, the Mr. built some drawers in lower cabinets.

Our kitchen has come a long way from its ugly duckling beginnings. It may be small, but it has functioned really well for us. Even when both the Mr. and I are in the kitchen, we never seem to be in each other's way. Cooking isn't my forte, and I'm not an organized cook at all. When you think making one-pot pasta sounds as easy as can be, I can still manage to spread out everything onto the 4 countertop spaces around the stove, ie. both sides of stove, plus both sides of the sink. The Mr. can laugh all he wants about it, but we both appreciate all the counter space our integrated appliances (fridge/ freezer drawers and microwave drawer) have freed up. We still think it's the best design decision we've made for this kitchen.

DRESSING ROOM

Another space in our house with a humbling beginning was our DIY custom closet/ dressing room. As mentioned in my previous post, we made a video of the building process and there have been 15,000+ views as of writing.

I'm so proud of the Mr.'s ultimate build of my dream closet; it's both beautiful and functional. The pull-out folding table gets the award for beauty in function. It has made all the folding more bearable, as I've taken the Marie Kondo* route to organizing my closet. The Mr. was also worried that I wouldn't have enough room for my clothes in this shared closet, but I'm happy to report that I still have extra space even after some shopping 😁

PLAYROOM WORKBENCH/ STORAGE

I can stand my own mess (oh ya, anytime), but this is one room where mess can actually be hazardous (imagine the pain of stepping on a stray piece of Lego!). Little man doesn't actually have much toys, but for some reason, the floor was covered with so much stuff at one point where I had to part the Red Sea to get to his desk.

Thank goodness the Mr. came to the rescue! He quickly whipped up this table top part of a storage bench that I designed. It's been a great spot to store and display some of little man's Lego collections. He has also used it as a building table; this ottoman is just the right height for him to work there.

As for the storage part, the pieces of wood for the drawers that go underneath the bench have been cut... just waiting for the Mr. to stain them and put them together! That's the main (and most important) missing part of this playroom!! (Can you tell I can't wait for it to be done by my exclamation marks? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

I've sourced out decorative items that are suitable for a playroom, namely a low pile rug, vinyl-front frames for the gallery wall, caged light fixture instead of one with exposed bulb, just to name a few. You can see my playroom design board in this post, and the reveal here.

UPCOMING PROJECTS

Basement Family Room

The Mr. and I started working on the basement family room design, which I wrote about in this post. The walls have been painted to a more neutral colour, which is more pleasing to the eyes than the original too-yellowish cream colour.

We had a poll for our basement DIY storage furniture - to build from scratch or do another IKEA hack? You can submit your choice here!

Laundry Room

Oh, our laundry room can definitely use some storage help. Back at our previous house, I used to store off-season decor items in our cabinets, which were of abundance. I would love to clean up the laundry room once and for all, with the cleaning supplies hidden behind closed doors!

Master Ensuite Vanity

Well, if you've been following along, then you would know how much I love (LOVE!!!) drawers. Currently, this is our master ensuite's vanity situation:

Yup, not drawers, and that means lots of wasted storage space inside the cabinets. I know I need to purge some products, as they're now carefully sitting on each other like I'm building a pyramid. That's what happens when I'm not working with drawers 😓

Ideally, these cabinets will house two drawers under each sink. One would be for products and the other our linen drawer. Between the Mr. and I, there should be plenty of room in each drawer.

This is one of my inspirations for our vanity. You can read more about my bathroom design plan here and colour choice here.

Between work, family commitments, and other minor home projects, I think the Mr. has done an excellent job around the house. He's meticulous with his planning (measure twice and cut once!), never rushes through his work, and gives his projects an amazing finish. I would give him an exceed expectations for his grading 😂 There're still loads of work to be done in our house, and they're enough to keep the Mr. busy for a long while!

It's been fun to look over at the before's and after's of the projects. You can see all these and some other projects on the Mr.'s honey-do list. Yup, he'll be a very busy man!!

The saying "Time flies when you're having fun" really applies to us here at our "new" house. It's not so new anymore, we've just celebrated our first year anniversary here! Our builder's cookie-cutter townhouse is slowly, but surely, turning into our home sweet home - thanks to the Mr.'s tightly packed DIY projects schedule.

Addressing storage was on the top of our priority list when we moved in. Having a spot for everything definitely helps with keeping the house more organized (though admittedly, I'm still not very good at staying organized!).

If you've been following along, then you would know the Mr.'s ultimate build was our closet/ dressing room. We had designed it to have a spot for everything, from his ties to my scarves.

Since the building of the closet was a lengthy process, we decided to make a video of it instead of blogging about it with pictures. To our surprise, the YouTube video of his entire process has more than 12,000 views and our channel has more than 170 subscribers!

Of course, this is nothing compared to the millions of views garnered by celebrities! But your continued support and kind comments, both on YouTube and Instagram, mean a great deal to us!! The Mr. and I are immensely grateful for all the love you've shown us, and we thank you for that.

If you haven't watched our video, grab a coffee and take a moment to enjoy it (see video below). Let us know of any feedback in the comment section. We want to make our videos better and are open to any constructive feedbacks.

Sometimes a DIY project can be so huge that it consumes much of your "me" time and every ounce of patience. Even the best of DIY'er, no matter how much s/he enjoys the project, would want to get it done and move on to the next project. I can see a bunch of you DIY'ers nodding your head in agreement. I feel for you, and the Mr. can relate.

Our DIY closet/ dressing room was one such monstrous build. The Mr. worked on our closet tirelessly, after work and on weekends. In between the miscellaneous projects I threw at him (my bad) and other commitments, (did I mention he was also the coach of our son's hockey team?), he managed to stay afloat. Although it took longer than he expected, the build is now complete, AND the chandelier installed. WOO-HOO!

To mark this special occasion, we've put together a video that documents the blood and sweat that went into the building of this closet. It's funny how this closet required so much detailed planning, that the Mr. was amazed he had done it all while watching the video.

(Please scroll to the bottom of this post for a source guide.)

After he came back from his much-deserved amazing guys' trip last month, I again had a bunch of "stuff" lined up for him. Putting up this chandelier was one of them. It's the cherry on top; what the closet/ dressing room needed to feel complete. The sparkles from the chandelier compliment the sparkly glass pulls on the doors, and bring out the gold tone in the drawer hardware.

If you've only started to follow our blog, allow me to backtrack a bit. This closet came to be when we made a request to the builder of this new house to delete the wall that separates the "his and her" closets, so that we can create this dressing room.

The closet's design went through several iterations and changes, and we ultimately ended with our current design. We were very into the boutique style closet for a long time, and even researched the DIY possibilities. However, we leaned towards a closet of closed storage, so that I can hide my mess!

So we blended these two sources of closet inspiration:

Image via Atlanta Homes

... any Sex and the City fan would recognize Carrie Bradshaw's dreamy dressing room from the movie:

Image via Marks & Frantz, set designer

... and we created our own version:

Now, this is a dressing room fit for a princess; one who demands that there's a spot for all her specific storage needs. (Did I just describe myself? ;-P )

While making the DIY start-to-finish video above, I witnessed once again the Mr.'s persistence to complete this project. I never doubted his ability to build this closet, and like I mentioned in the previous update, the closet turned out to be even more beautiful and elegant than I had imagined. I hope he knows that I am immensely proud of this monstrous undertaking.

Well, that's precisely one of the reasons why I started this blog, so that I would be reminded again and again of the Mr.'s dedication to making our house a beautiful home. For this home, this custom closet/ dressing room is the first step to making this home a classy and glamorous one.

Understandably, building from scratch isn't for the faint of heart. But we've also done an easier dressing room in our previous home with IKEA PAX wardrobes. All you need are some mouldings. Check it out here!

(Scroll down for source guide)

We hope we haven't kept you waiting for too long for this final reveal of our DIY custom closet/ dressing room! Here are the previous updates of this DIY project:

We moved into our builder's cookie-cutter townhouse in the Fall of 2015 and have been constantly decorating it into our dream home. I have an ever-growing honey-do list, thanks to Pinterest. The hubby, an avid DIY’er, is helping us realize our dream home. Welcome to our blog, where we share our DIY projects and design ideas of our old and new house, as we incorporate our new motto Small Space, Big Living.

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